How the Beats helped build San Francisco's progressive...

1of17Allen Ginsberg thumbs through a Jack Kerouac work at a San Francisco bookstore in June 1959.Photo: Joe Rosenthal / The Chronicle

2of17Poet Kenneth Rexroth (left), a well-respected figure in the San Francisco literary scene when many of the Beats moved in, participates in a poetry reading.Photo: Nat Farbman / The LIFE Picture Collection/Gett

3of17Beat author William S. Burroughs, who wrote “Junky” and “Naked Lunch,” signs a book at a San Francisco store in 1984.Photo: Paul Sakuma / ASSOCIATED PRESS

4of17Influential Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth in North Beach in March 1980.Photo: Chronicle file

Judge Clayton W. Horn scolded the police in English and French before declaring that Allen Ginsberg’s poetry tour de force “Howl” was not an obscenity.

“The judge’s decision was hailed with applause and cheers from a packed audience that offered the most fantastic collection of beards, turtlenecked shirts and Italian hairdos ever to grace the grimy precincts of the Hall of Justice,” wrote David Perlman, who remains a Chronicle reporter in 2015.

It was arguably the turning point for the Beat Generation, which would spawn a memorable poetry scene and cultural era for the city.

But the movement began earlier than the “Howl” verdict, and had a much bigger impact on future San Francisco than was predicted at the time. The Beatniks, as named by Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, had a positive influence on visual arts, performing arts and music. They challenged the values of a conservative city. And they built a foundation for a progressive future.

Historians list the “Howl” trial, and earlier Six Gallery readings, as the beginning of the Bay Area’s Beat awakening. But it arguably began incubating a decade earlier, when Madeline Gleason started the Festival of Poetry at a small gallery on Gough Street in San Francisco.

It was credited at the time as the first poetry festival in the nation. Gleason had fiery red hair and passion for live performance — preaching the musical aspects of poetry. She said live readings made the poem “complete.”

“Reading aloud provides the ear with the poem’s music,” Gleason told The Chronicle in 1949. “Articulation brings to the attention changes in tempo (and) nuance … of a poem and in a poem are of equal importance, being completely interdependent on one another for the poem’s special meaning.”

A regular at Gleason’s readings was Kenneth Rexroth, an Indiana native who had been writing book reviews for The Chronicle since the 1930s. He was a fixture in the city when many of the Beats, who had lived in New York in the 1940s, came to San Francisco.

Rexroth was the master of ceremonies at the Six Gallery reading on Oct. 7, 1955, where Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Ginsberg and others performed.

The Chronicle didn’t write about the Six Gallery reading, any of the literary salons in Rexroth’s apartment, or other very early Beat gatherings. There was no mention of characters such as Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, who was gathering material for his 1957 classic “On the Road” and 1958 book “The Dharma Bums.”

But the newspaper covered the book scene, giving ink to bold new voices in a conservative postwar climate. “Howl and Other Poems,” from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s new City Lights Pocket Poets series, was one of several poetry books mentioned in a Jan. 6, 1957, Chronicle column.

There was no controversy until almost three months later, on March 26, 1957, when a five-paragraph article appeared on Page 2 of The Chronicle.

Customs official Chester McPhee, who had been campaigning to keep literature he found obscene from children for months, confiscated 520 copies of “Howl” that had been shipped from London to the City Lights bookstore. The police backed McPhee, with an alarmingly subjective method for determining what books should be banned.

“Somebody’s got to make a complaint against them,” San Francisco Police Capt. William Hanrahan told The Chronicle. “Then we look them over and try to decide whether they’re filthy, lewd or indecent.”

Ginsberg and his allies were organized, speaking sensibly to the press when the authorities seemed alarmist. Rexroth’s ties to The Chronicle probably helped their cause. While Chronicle readers who wrote letters to the editor seemed split on McPhee’s actions, the newspaper’s columnists and editorial staff were nearly unified in defense of “Howl.”

Chronicle editorial writer Abe Mellinkoff, who called MacPhee “ignorant” a few days after the confiscation, was typical of the support.

“If a literary Iron Curtain is to be erected along the Embarcadero,” he wrote, “let’s put some professors of literature there to patrol it.”

William S. Burroughs (left) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in San Francisco in 1981.

Photo: Chris Felver / Getty Images

Later, The Chronicle’s William Hogan turned his entire Between the Lines book column over to Ferlinghetti, where the poet and bookstore owner seemed to taunt authorities.

“The San Francisco Collector of Customs deserves a word of thanks for seizing Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl and Other Poems,’ and thereby rendering it famous,” Ferlinghetti said. “Perhaps we could have a medal made. It would have taken years for the critics to accomplish what the good collector did in a day, merely by calling the book obscene.”

The case went to trial, and a verdict for the authors came down on Oct. 4, 1957. “Honi soit qui mal y pense. Evil on him who thinks evil,” Judge Horn wrote. When the booksellers were declared innocent, the crowd cheered the verdict as if they were in a movie.

“The most succinct comment came from Ferlinghetti,” Perlman wrote in his Chronicle coverage, “who, when he was done shaking congratulatory hands with all the North Beach bards in the courtroom, hurried back to his store without a word and stacked his windows with copies of the book — price 75 cents; in print, 10,000 copies.”

During the long legal proceeding, a new spotlight was placed on Beat writings. Poets including Snyder, McClure, Jack Spicer and Philip Whalen were also reviewed. Before the “Howl” controversy, Beat books and poetry received brief mention at best. On Sept. 1, 1957, Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” was reviewed by Rexroth on nearly a full page.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti with Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in September 1957.

Photo: Bob Campbell / The Chronicle

“Whatever else it is, and whether it’s good or bad, this is pretty sure to be the most ‘remarkable’ novel of 1957,” Rexroth wrote. “It is about something everybody talks about and nobody does anything about — the delinquent younger generation. … It is by a new author, the best prose representative of the San Francisco Renaissance which has created so much hullabaloo lately.”

Whether this renaissance was happening was debated by the Beats themselves. But there was a very real shift going on in the conservative city; as the Beats were getting attention, live theater, music and modern art were reaching new zeniths as well. Jazz and political comedy were thriving in North Beach, with innovators including Dave Brubeck, Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce. The rise of the Beats coincided with some great years for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

George Christopher, the city’s last Republican mayor, was in office in 1957 and would stay there until 1964. But the “Howl” verdict seemed to reveal a streak of social justice in the city, and the Beat culture became more of an object of curiosity, and less of an object of derision, from the population.

Herb Caen’s famous invention of the word “Beatnik,” on April 3, 1958, fell somewhere between patronizing and fascination toward the group that he would banter with for much of the next decade. Here’s the item in its entirety:

“AND FURTHERMORE: Scotty MacDuckston peered into The Place, Grant Ave. hangout for the bearded Beatnik Generation, and was taken aback to see an old friend of his in there — Harry Bloom, impeccable and dapper in a gray suit, white shirt, black tie, polished shoes. ‘Harry Whaddya doing HERE?’ gasped Scotty. “All of a sudden I got a desire to be nonconformist,’ explained Bloom, ‘and in here, I sure am!’”

While Caen joked, the police continue aggressive tactics in North Beach. The first half of 1958 was filled with petty raids of Beat establishments. During one police sting at Eric Nord’s Party Pad, seven customers and employees were busted for dancing without a permit.

“Police asserted undercover agents of the Special Services Bureau were charged $1 each on Friday night and also a week ago to enter the Party Pad. Inside, they said, they saw people dancing to phonograph music,” The Chronicle reported. Police Lt. Norbert Currie “said police have no grounds for closing the Party Pad, ‘but we can prohibit dancing by keeping an eye on the place.’”

Early the next year, police who had grown beards infiltrated the Beat scene for months and busted 20 for mostly petty drug crimes, including a 21-year-old woman who had been married just hours earlier.

But this time, citizens in the neighborhoods seemed to side with the nonconformists in their midst. In the letters published in The Chronicle, at least, San Francisco readers seemed uncomfortable with the police state.

“Editor — I have just stumbled on to the solution of all the unsolved crimes in San Francisco: Just take all those police officers and plainclothesmen who are harassing the Beatniks and divert them to a more worthwhile use,” Florence Estrada wrote three days after the Party Pad bust. “Is it a crime to be a Beatnik?”

Beatniks protest outside a “No Beatniks Allowed” sign at the Square’s Lair in September 1958.

Photo: Bob Campbell / The Chronicle

As crowds came to North Beach, Beat Generation fascination seemed to grow. The Chronicle answered this curiosity with a two-part series in the Sunday paper, written by Allen Brown, titled “Life and Love Among the Beatniks.” The articles, while not condemning the culture, were sensational.

But they also offered a valuable physical description of the Beat stronghold in North Beach on Grant Avenue from Vallejo to Filbert streets — described by one inhabitant as “an open-air, come-and-go mental hospital three blocks long.”

“They are not beat in the sense that they are tired; they don’t work that hard. They are not beat in the musical sense; they are too cool, too indifferent, too pseudo intellectual to care about foot-tapping jazz,” Brown wrote. “They are beat because they feel battered by life. They have lost faith in nearly everything, and they refuse to conform to the ideals in which they no longer believe.”

At the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, The Chronicle described, there was a huge poster of Henry Miller; the “Tropic of Cancer” author was a Beat ally who had attended the “Howl” trials. The Cellar, the Coffee Gallery and Tea Room and the Place (written on the wall: “Herb Caen Can Go Home”) were all thriving meeting spots for the generation’s artists.

The Beats responded to all this coverage by renting two buses and visiting the city’s more bourgeoisie climes, mimicking the tourists and well-heeled locals who had been descending on Grant Avenue to peer at the Beat Generation lives.

Beatniks go on a tour of San Francisco, visiting the St, Francis Hotel, Union Square and I. Magnin's, August 11, 1958.

Photo: Bob Campbell / The Chronicle

By the early 1960s, the media had stopped covering the Beats like they were zoo exhibits, and experts were starting to analyze what it all meant.

Grover Sales Jr., a writer and talent agent, had this cynical take in 1961:

“These are the children of the H-bomb. Their mothers were spot-welding Lockheed by day and playing musical beds by night. They are poor, neglected, confused, rootless and very sick kiddies whose real significance resides not in their own selves, but in the national reaction to their doings and the attention that has been forced upon them.”

Chronicle jazz columnist Ralph J. Gleason was more kind:

“They are busy, working, creative artists and they have struck terror in the hearts of the Establishment of Letters, because like the jazz musicians they admire, they have shied away from orthodoxy and tried to break new ground.”

As a phenomenon, the Beat Generation was short-lived. But the Beats themselves turned out to be positive ambassadors of their time and their movement. Ferlinghetti stayed at City Lights. Spicer (before he died in 1965) and Snyder and others joined nearby college faculties. Whalen became a monk. Ginsberg played the elder statesman well, at one point throwing out the first pitch at a Giants game. He died in 1997, just a few months after a Haight-Ashbury poetry reading.

For the most part, the greatest Beat poets remained true to their values, which included a resistance to being categorized. When the Summer of Love and the “hippies” generated more concern among city leaders, the Beat poets seemed sympathetic. “Let us remain in peace” and without labels, Ginsberg told a reporter in 1967, correctly predicting that the TV cameras and tourists that were gawking at the “hippie” phenomenon would ruin the Haight-Ashbury.

In 2015, the Beats are beloved, a symbol of what San Francisco has become. Tolerant, with a social conscience. Recognizing the potential of people who think different. Maybe not understanding every book or poem, but understanding the value of the poem-writer.

“In passing, may I say that I have read and dislike Mr. Ginsberg’s verse,” reader Elton M. Davis wrote, in one of those pro-Beatnik letters to the editor in 1957. “I am grateful for the opportunity to have reached my own conclusions on the subject.”

Chronicle librarian Bill Van Niekerken contributed to the research of this chapter.

Do you have unique photos or video related to an Our San Francisco topic? Send an e-mail with your story to phartlaub@sfchronicle.com. We’ll be sharing reader memories on The Big Event blog at www.sfgate.com throughout the year.

Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop culture critic and host of the podcast The Big Event. The Bay Area native has worked at The Chronicle since 2000, and was a Chronicle paperboy from 1982 to 1984. He reviews movies, television and comedy, covers entertainment, creates multimedia projects and writes the Our San Francisco local history column. The Big Event is recorded in The Chronicle’s basement archive. Hartlaub lives in Alameda.